Walking up the front porch, visitors will be met with a rainbow of lights projecting from one of Shahla K. And Spago was that in a nutshell: this idea that you could come off the bus and become a movie star.” Art by Christine Wang It permeated culture beyond its viewership. “But you could see it from the Sunset Strip, so you could only imagine what was going on, assuming it was something like Hollywood Babylon, which came out in 1965 and established Hollywood as this sleazy place where everyone was fucking everyone, doing drugs, murdering each other. “Wolfgang Puck made this restaurant that was supposed to be this democratic, utopian, socialist kind of space-one of the first organic farm-to-table restaurants-but the only way you could get in was if you were Sylvester Stallone or Jeffrey Deitch,” says Ritchie Handler, dressing the part in black-and-white striped bell-bottoms and fur-lined Gucci slippers as he walks me through a new cast bronze patio door imprinted with Biagi’s thumbprints. They serve to layer a new (quasi-fictional) veneer of psycho-sexual mythology onto Wolfgang Puck’s famed celebrity haunt, which attracted everyone from Warren Beatty to David Hockney during its storied run at the location from 1982 to 2001. The show employs the experimental films of artist and occultist Kenneth Anger, which will be projected onto the building’s newly whitewashed facade.

have transformed BADD House into a veritable house of ill repute for Hollywood Babylon: A Re-Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, a multimedia group exhibition, which will be open to the public for the duration of Frieze Week following tonight’s private opening party. With some help from Nicodim and Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Ritchie Handler and Co.

“We’re giving new life to the former iconic Spago restaurant by bringing back the energy and culture of this historical Sunset Strip location,” says Biagi, who staged a show of his own work in the space a year ago.Īfter a conversation with Nicodim Gallery’s Ben Lee Ritchie Handler, who’d been scheming since September with Autre editor and founder Oliver Kupper how to re-energize the space during the annual art fair Frieze Los Angeles, Biagi turned the keys over to the chimerical curator. Then, two years ago, Italian artist Mattia Biagi and Darrin Wilson, his partner in the preservation-minded real estate development group Studio Dardo, revamped it and rechristened it as the BADD House. Like the empty shell of Tower Records that sits across the street, the original West Hollywood digs of Spago at 1114 Horn Avenue sat empty for nearly two decades.

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